So… you’ve heard all about the “hybrid clouds” (all around us), and you’ve finally decided to go with the truly hybrid one – the one from Microsoft, which consists of Microsoft Azure, extended to Microsoft Azure Stack on-premises.

If you are just starting and want to learn about it, you may find it difficult (and rather costly) to obtain the fully integrated OEM solution for your lab. But, there is a solution – Microsoft provides the development kit (ASDK), which can be used for playing around, learning and development (of course).

Where to get started?

First stop should definitely be the official Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) page. There, you can register for the download of ASDK software:

After that, you’ll receive a page with all the info you need – hardware and deployment requirements, download and step-by-step guidance links:

First, I recommend you to read through the requirements, and then you can run the prerequisites check script, just to double-check you have all that is needed. Don’t forget that, with hardware, you’ll also need an Azure subscription!

Script should give you output similar to mine (note that I’m using the virtual machine as my “ASDK host” and will be nesting all of it inside Hyper-V, of course):

If everything is fine, you’re ready to download the ASDK, using the provided downloader:

Download of ~12 GB may take a while, so “Please sit back and relax…” (as during the Windows 98 installation, some time ago).

The last step is to unpack the downloaded ADSK binaries (actually, the CloudBuilder.vhdx, as you’ll see):

There is also a short video to help you with the first steps inside the “brave new ASDK world”:

In my next post, I’ll show you how to prepare a Hyper-V virtual machine for hosting the ASDK – not the most performing environment, but it’s ‘good enough for a simple lab, if you don’t have the hardware one.

Stay tuned!